Carl Jung: First-rate spiritualistic phenomena occur in this case, though so far only once in my presence.
Dear Professor Freud 2 April 1909
Worry and patients and all the other chores of daily life have beset once again and quite got me down for the first 2 days.
Now I am slowly corning to the surface and beginning to bask in the memory of the days in Vienna.
I hope you received my offprints in good time for Wednesday evening.12 Apri1. 28
After a ro-day interruption i have at last succeeded in continuing TI1Y letter.
From this interlude it appears that the above complaint was premature, because, as usual, worse was to follow.
Today I have put the last bad day behind me.
All during the Easter holidays, when other people were out walking, I've been able to snatch only one day's breath of air.
On the 15th I'll wrench myself free without fail and start my bicycle tour.
Since Vienna all scientific work has been out of the question.
But in my practice 1have accomplished much.
At the moment a madly interesting case is stretching me on the rack.
Some of the symptoms come suspiciously close to the organic borderline (brain turnour/), yet they all hover over a dimly divined psychogenic depth, so that in analyzing them all one's misgivings are forgotten ..
First-rate spiritualistic phenomena occur in this case, though so far only once in my presence.
Altogether it makes a very peculiar impression.
The patient is a man-slaying Sara, Raguel's daughter.
The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac impression-was cleared up as follows.
She was abandoned by her last lover, who is altogether pathological (Dem. praec.?); abandoned also by an earlier lover-this one even spent a year in an asylum.
Now the infantile pattern: hardly knew her father and mother, loving instead her brother, 8 years older than she and at 22 a catatonic.
Thus the psychological stereotype holds good.
You said the patient was merely imitating Dem. praec.; now the model has been found.
When I left Vienna I was afflicted with some sentiments d'incompletude because of the last evening I spent with you.
It seemed to me that my spookery struck you as altogether too stupid and perhaps unpleasant because of the Fliess analogy." (Insanity)
Just recently, however, the impression I had of the last-named patient smote me with renewed force.
What I told my wife about it also made the deepest impression on her.
I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in Ulan.
If there is a "psychanalysis" there must also be a "psychosynthesis" which creates future events according to the same laws.
(I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.)
The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex.
(Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency!)
That last evening with you has, most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority.
My unconscious celebrated this impression with a great dream which has preoccupied me for some days and which I have just finished analyzing.
I hope I am now rid of all unnecessary encumbrances.
Your cause must and will prosper, so silly pregnancy fantasies tell me, which luckily you caught in the end.
As soon as I get back from Italy I shall begin some positive work, first of all for the Jahrbuch.
I hope you had a good Easter holiday and feel the better for it.
N. Ossipow, head physician of the psychiatric University Clinic in Moscow, has published a fine report on our affairs.
They seem to be working along our lines.
I have heard that Abraham with SOUle others has issued a "psych. analytical questionnaire."?
Let's hope it's a canard!
With kindest regards,
Yours gratefully, JUNG ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Vol. 1., Pages 215-217
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